Bookmark These: May 2010

ELLE's May reading recommendations

Guilty Pleasures
An original anthology of stories featuring spine-tingling stunners from such talented tale-tellers as Lawrence Block, Janice Lee, Stephen L. Carter, Lee Child, Patrick McCabe, and Francine Prose, The Dark End of the Street (Bloomsbury), edited by Jonathan Santlofer and S. J. Rozan, presents an elegant, eek-inducing case for seducing readers with kinky, cautionary yarns about sex and crime.

Most Popular

Adoption and Connection
In The Red Thread (Norton), Ann Hood writes, "There exists a silken red thread of destiny. It is said that this magical cord may tangle or stretch but never break." So begins this wisely woven novel of a woman who opens an adoption agency for Chinese children after her own young daughter dies, both to help couples achieve their desire for parenthood and to mend her own frayed heart.

How to Picture a Life
The graphic memoir Forget Sorrow (Norton), by artist and children's-book author Belle Yang, re-creates Yang's extended family's dramatic ancestral history through the political upheavals of twentieth-century China, while also illuminating personal struggles such as being stalked by an ex-boyfriend and facing tensions with her oldworld parents. It's a healing portrait drawn in epic ink strokes.